Happy New Year! I’m joining Running on Happy and Fairytales and Fitness for the Friday Five 2.0 linkup! As appropriate for this time of year, today I’m thinking about goals/resolutions/intentions- whatever you want to call them. Here are my 5 running-related goals for 2017.
2017 Running/Fitness Goals
- Re-establish running 4 times a week. This fall, with injury and some time-management problems, I fell off the consistency-wagon. Time to get back on!
Me, Deb, and Jenn (who just kicked cancer’s butt!) after a humid Saturday run.
- Cross-train 1-2 times a week (strength training, yoga, swimming). For overall strength, this is super important. Particularly the strength and stretching aspects of cross-training. I need to make sure that these are part of my weekly/monthly schedule.
- Strengthen my hip weaknesses and do regular form drills. I need to keep doing my PT exercises and icing my hips this winter. I also need to find and do form drills to keep my hips even, pick up my feet more when I run, and stop the weird knee/foot swing thing I’ve been doing. I anticipate that this may be my hardest goal to keep with for the year- and yet, it’s probably the most important one.
- Run a 27:00 5K for a new PR. My current 5K PR is 27:53, which is a 8:58 per mile pace. To drop the 53 seconds, I need to be at a 8:41 min/mile pace. This doesn’t look like much when I write it out, but dropping those 20 second per mile is going to be hard. Speed work is in my future.
- Run a sub-2:00 half marathon (new PR). This means at 9:10 min/mile pace for the whole race. My current half PR is 2:03, but that was in fall 2015. My fastest half in 2016 was a 2:08 (9:46 min/mile pace) at Shamrock. So realistically, I need to get faster on my longer runs. Like 15-30 seconds per mile faster. I can do the long and slow- it’s just increasing my speed for longer distances. I think getting comfortable with being uncomfortable will also be key. Tempo/interval runs here I come this winter!
- Bonus: Put up a blog post at least once a week!
For January specifically, I have a few things I’m focusing on.
- Hip work at least 3x a week (ideally, 4-5 days). Combo of yoga, foam rolling, PT exercises, icing.
- Find and start to do form drills to keep my hips even and my feet/knees from turning.
- 4 yoga classes and 4 strength classes (yay for a yoga Groupon and my FuncFit folks!).
A lot of my 2017 and January goals are inter-related. I think as I get stronger, stay injury-free (fingers crossed), get back to running consistently, and fix my form/hip weakness, then getting faster will probably come on it’s own.
There’s also an intentionality factor. I’ve read many running books, and sometimes do track/speed work. But intervals, fartleks, tempo runs? Consistent speed workouts? Not so much. Intentionally adding these types of runs into each week will also improve my running.
Do you have a favorite hip exercise or form drill? Any advice going into 2017 for me? What is your top running goal?
I am so bad at doing form drills or certain exercises. I should have that be my goal to work on too this yr.
You’ve got some awesome goals! I’m hoping to break 2:15 in the half marathon this year…I only did it once and it was back in 2011. I’ve had some hip weakness, I actually think taking barre classes and yoga have helped a great deal!
I need to get back to form drills…I did a lot of “stuff” like that when I trained for my marathon, and I need to also keep doing the warm-up routine, even for short runs. Funny how the “not in training” mentality messes us up LOL